While the importance attached to theintegration of form and meaning (Long andRobinson 1998) andencouraginglearners to“notice” linguistic forms (Schmidt 2001: 4)is now well established, there has been littleempirical research that explores secondlanguage teacher use of techniques to directlearner attention to both language form andlanguage use in on-going classroominteractions. The main aim of this article isto profile the methods of an experiencedteacher in directing learner attention to bothlanguage knowledge and language use withinthe English as a Foreign Language (EFL)classroom, thereby providing insights foreffective English teaching.

Our Senior Research Manager Laura Patsko shares the first five of her top ten tips for teaching pronunciation. 1. Make sure you teach pronunciation! First and foremost on this list of top tips: don’t be afraid of teaching pronunciation! It isn’t just a ‘nice to have’. It affects all areas of language learning – for …

The eighth international Corpus Linguistics conference (CL2015) will be held at Lancaster University from Tuesday 21st July 2015 to Friday 24th July 2015, preceded by a workshop day on Monday 20th July.

Shona Whyte's insight:

Abstracts here for #cl2015 on #corpus #linguistics. Focus on learner corpora, paper by @loopy63 and lots of jokes about the importance of size ...

"Apparently, just 12 lexical verbs (say, get, go, know, think, see, make, come, take, want, give, and mean) account for 45% of lexical verbs used in conversation. Biber and Reppern suggest that, since they are so frequently used in speech, these verbs require more attention in class than they currently do, judging by the coursebooks that they reviewed, and that they should be used more to exemplify various grammar structures.

I’m thinking of giving the students an occasional gap-fill exercise based on the reading and listening texts that we are working on, with these verbs gapped out. Finding and replacing the various forms of these verbs could be time-consuming, but there’s a free nifty little text editor called Notepad++ in which one can make such a gap-fill exercise in one click.

This is quite an extensive bank of listening sites. Some are familiar (Ted Talks, ELLLO, NPR's Story Corps and VOA) but there are many others that include stories, news and interviews from around the world, and academic lectures. Several of the sites are specifically for English language learners. This impressive library of listening material should be on every ESL/EFL teacher's favorites.

This study measured the fluency of learner speech before and after a 4-week intensive English course at a British university. The experimental group received awareness-raising activities, strategy training, and fluency practice, while the control group received more general listening/speaking instruction. On 4 of 9 fluency measures, the experimental group outperformed the control group; speech rate showed the largest advantage, but articulation rate, mean length of run and of pause were also significantly better. (The study also measured accuracy and complexity, but found no difference on 3 of 4 measures, and a slight advantage to the control group on verb accuracy.)

The authors suggest that

"providing effective instruction and creating opportunities for practice facilitated the process of proceduralisation of learner interlanguage, which might have contributed to the learners’ preparedness for developing a degree of automatisation in their performance (DeKeyser, 2001, 2007; Segalowitz, 2010)" (p. 17)

They conclude that

"a key finding of the current study is that, although the classroom context often provides limited and insufficient opportunities for L2 practice, tailor-made training aimed at improving fluency can have short-term positive effects" (p. 20)

Shona Whyte's insight:

This is an interesting finding from what looks like a well-designed and controlled study, using fewer than 40 learners but in an ecologically valid study and including a range of measures of fluency, accuracy and complexity. While explanation of the findings in terms of second language theory goes beyond the scope of the paper, the teaching implications are encouraging.

The experimental group received the following teaching:

1. Activities to raise awareness of different aspects of fluency. Students lis- tened to a nonnative speaker of English retelling a picture story and evaluated the speaker’s fluency in terms of speed, pausing, and repair measures. Students examined the transcript of the picture story retelling and identified where fluency had broken down.

2. Strategies that can be used for improving fluency. Using lexical fillers (e.g., well) and longer lexical chunks (e.g., let me think) and practising them in conversations. Avoiding repetitions and hesi- tations in conversations when possible.

3. Opportunities for practising fluency. In class: Retelling the picture story that they had listened to in exercise 1. At home: Retelling another picture story and recording their performance, listening

to their own performance to identify fluency problems, and recording their performance of the same task again.

A couple of years ago we published a post on 'what Shakespeare sounded like to Shakespeare' which highlighted some prominent linguists' attempts to recreate the Elizabethan speech patterns and accents of the playwright's day.

ELTED Journal celebrated its 20th anniversary on 24 June 2015 by moving to this new website and sending out a new call for contributions for a special issue, on Innovative Writing in English Language Teacher Education and Development.

English Language Teacher Education and Development (ELTED) Journal - ISSN 1365-3741 - is an open access peer-reviewed journal for the worldwide ELT community which is produced by the Language Learning, Teaching and Assessment (LLTA) Research Group of the Centre for Applied Linguistics, University of Warwick. It seeks to provide a medium for the exchange of ideas and information on theoretical and applied issues pertaining to English language teacher education. The journal is targeted at all those involved in English language teacher education and development worldwide, for whom, at present, there are few published journals dealing specifically with English language teacher education and development.

Shona Whyte's insight:

Call for proposals for special issues on innovative writing in ELT teacher education

Teaching Pragmatics explores the teaching of pragmatics through lessons and activities.

Shona Whyte's insight:

This looks like a nice resource for teachers with practical lesson ideas for different aspects of pragmatics (speech acts like apologies, refusals, negotiating conversation and so on). Lots of clicking to find only PDFs in the end, but names I recognise (Salsbury, Kontra). Planning to use if for training new teachers this fall.

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